. . . In Maryland, 'A 20-year Overnight Success Story'

October 31, 1986|By Ellen Goodman, Washington Post Writers Group

BALTIMORE — The temperature in the packed room has reached sauna level by the time Barbara Mikulski works her way to the stage. There is no flying wedge of pin- striped aides before her. At 4 feet 11 inches, she finds her own path, weaving shoulder-level past the supporters who have come to this fund-raiser.

Short, stocky, rough around the edges, Barbara Mikulski doesn't fill Hollywood's image of The Senator. Yet, unless there is a massive upset, Barbara Mikulski is about to become the first Democratic woman elected to the Senate in her own right.

Tonight Mikulski is on her own turf. She has lived most of her life within walking distance of the building where this party is being held. The sleek renovated Tindeco Wharf on Baltimore's resurrected harbor would have disappeared into pavement for a 16-lane highway if Mikulski hadn't organized a campaign movement to stop that highway in the 1960s.

Granddaughter of a Polish immigrant who ran a bakery, daughter of parents who owned a neighborhood grocery, the woman everyone calls ''Barbara'' is a known quantity in the metropolitan area that accounts for 50 percent of the state's voters. A former Baltimore social worker, a former city councillor, a congresswoman for 10 years, she has built a reputation as tough, smart- mouthed, funny and caring.

As the man introducing her to this crowd says in a hyperbolic frenzy, ''She is the people person of all people people.'' The label means something in a campaign year when voters aren't talking issues, but are seeking the candidates and the character they feel most comfortable with.

''People vote for the candidates they know,'' agrees Mikulski later as we talk over an Italian dinner, while she cheerfully sabotages her perennial attempt to keep down to campaigning weight. ''That's always been true. BUT,'' she says wagging her fork for emphasis, ''most of all they vote for candidates who know THEM. I've spent a lot of time getting to know them.'' She adds with an ironic smile, ''I'm a 20-year overnight success story.''

Mikulski's politics are grounded in this mutual knowing. It is what gave her the victory in a difficult three-way Democratic primary. It is what has stabilized her lead against an increasingly negative campaign by Republican Linda Chavez.

To the outside world, a Senate race between two women may be portrayed as a novelty item -- rather like ''tricolored bubble gum,'' in Mikulski's wry phrase. But in Maryland it is playing as a race between Mikulski, the longtime activist, and Chavez, a candidate who switched parties and states less than three years ago.

Chavez's main if dubious qualification is that she directed the U.S. Civil Rights Commission under Reagan. In her ads and debates, she has tried to convince Maryland people that they don't know Mikulski as she ''really'' is: a ''San Francisco-style'' Democrat, an anti-male radical feminist. But it just isn't playing on Mikulski's home ground. If negative advertising hasn't worked for Chavez, neither have coattails. The president who took this state by a comfortable margin in 1984 came in a while ago, labeled Mikulski a ''wily liberal,'' raised $400,000 for Chavez and left without making a dent in the polls.

As Milkulski looks back on Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, she says, ''You need more than people . . . at rallies saying, 'Ger-ry, Ger-ry.' You need to know the difference between a celebrity and a candidate.''

With that, Mikulski, very much a candidate, heads home, back to the attached brick house in her old neighborhood where she lives next door to a woman on Social Security, across the street from a senior-citizens project. Mikulski, front-runner and overnight sensation. It took just 20 years of overnights.